They met by Magic. Actually, the section at the Strand bookstore where they first met is labeled Occult, but that’s where the store keeps its books on magic. Kristen and Jenny’s shared interest in magic helps explain why they started dating, and then moved in together for six years – until Jenny winds up in the hospital.
“Open,” a one-woman play by Crystal Skillman that opens today at WP Theater, uses magic tricks as both method and metaphor for telling the story both of the two women and of the way Kristen processes her grief. But it takes a while to realize that’s what’s going on. Megan Hill, dressed in top hat and gaudy jacket, introduces herself as a magician presenting a magic show, or, rather, a deliberate simulacrum of a magic show. (Fans of actual magic shows, be forewarned.) The result is a production that’s clever, if also confusing, and ultimately haunting.
“Reality, we don’t really get along,” the magician says near the start, as she explains that we in the audience are going to have to “imagine…each of these magic tricks I perform.” And then, on the bare stage, she demonstrates what she means, by pantomiming the pulling of a (non-existent) bouquet of flowers from her hat.
And so it goes. She turns an egg into a bird, performs rope tricks, card tricks, walks a tightrope, levitates – all in pantomime. Some of the pantomime shows off Hill’s theater training, such as the way she masterfully shuffles an invisible deck of cards. They also show off Emma Wilk’s sound design. These tricks correspondent to the story the magician tells in more or less obvious ways – most clearly, the (imaginary) balls she juggles in the air “Secrets are the balls we keep in the air. Ours will come crashing down this evening.” The balls represent, she tells us, First Love. Commitment. Sacrifice. And a promise.
Kristen (for she is the magician) then presents scenes of her life with Jenny, specific, vivid, often charming – how their first date was at Marie’s Crisis, the second in Santaland at Macy’s; how Jenny decorated the apartment they moved into (“Kitchen colors: Egg Yolk Yellow, Nacho Cheese Orange, Optimistic Peach”); how Jenny helped Kristen, who had a job working the copy machine of a Staples, become a writer (of a book involving magic); how Jenny, who had a job at the LGBT Community Center, helps Kristen overcome her shock “after this past election” by organizing a panel of civil rights activists at the Center on how to move forward.
It may count as a bitter irony that “Open” was first performed at The Tank in 2019 (the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the birth of the modern gay rights movement) – so Kristen was talking about a different election, but it has become newly relevant six years later. Threaded throughout “Open” are the dangers of being open about being queer. Kristen recalls how she was hcckled as a teenager holding hands with a girlfriend in her hometown of Indianapolis, and such attacks didn’t stop after she moved to New York. And not just verbal: “The flowers and candles and pictures they put up at StoneWall whenever violence happens and it keeps happening.”
That’s what happens to Jenny, and why Kristen is performing this magic show – for Jenny’s sake, to keep the magic going.
Open
WP Theater through July 27
Running time: About 75 minutes with no intermission
Tickets: $20 to $60
Written by Crystal Skillman
Directed by Jessi D. Hill
Lighting and scenic design by Sarah Johnston, sound design by Emma Wilk, costume design by Madeline Wall
Cast: Megan Hill
Understudy Lily Ali-Oshatz
Photographs by Jeremy Varner
